Essays on History and New Media

Below are links to essays devoted to the theoretical and practical aspects
of taking history into a digital format—many of them by people associated with
the Center for History and New Media. We would like to expand this list and
welcome suggestions of essays that might be added.

Using 'History Matters' with a Ninth-Grade Class

David Kobrin

This article was originally published in The
History Teacher 34, 3 (May 2001): 339-344 and is reprinted here
with permission.

I wander around the computer lab watching my ninth
grade class, all of whom appear absorbed by what they are discovering
on the Internet. Even the sometimes frustrating hunt for new information
seems to fascinate them. Occasionally one student calls across the
room to another when she stumbles on a new site that might be helpful
to someone else. Or students ask me for help in making sense of
what they are finding, or in determining whether a site is trustworthy,
or in searching for sources on their topic. It's like a community
of scholars, I think, except that they are ninth graders in a United
States history class in a Jewish Day School in Rockville, Maryland,
all of whom carry a double load of classes. (They must takes courses
in Jewish subjects, like Rabbinics and Bible, in addition to the
usual high school schedule.) If I forget to give a "two minute
warning" before the bell rings so that they can save, log off,
and figure out their homework for that night, they work through
the bell. They have lost track of time. It's not exactly my
doing as their teacher, much as it pleases me to create projects
and watch them learn. It's the Internet; and sites like http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu
that help make the Internet safe and accessible for ninth graders.

When there is a limit on the amount of information
available in a classroom, the students need to depend on the teacher
as the master of information. Conversely, when accurate information
is widely available, conveniently organized, and easily accessed,
then the nature of the learning that takes place can resemble more
what the AHA now advocates: students learn by "doing"
history. Given a structure and guidance, students can generate their
own questions based on their analysis of the historical record,
and then form conclusions that they validate by the data that they
analyzed. They can construct history–and know that's
what they've done, and why.

But the information must be accurate, organized,
and accessible. For this reason, I have found History
Matters most helpful as a portal sight. It is, along
with http://www.loc.gov and http://www.archives.gov/index.html,
the place where the students begin. Search engines such a Yahoo!,
Ask Jeeves, and Google! can turn up hundreds of sights in response
to a query about, say, the role of entrepreneurs, or immigrants,
or those enslaved, 1790-1865. Those sites, however, have not necessarily
been vetted by historians. History Matters,
on the other hand, is safe, secure, informative, and always accurate.
I tell students in my United States history classes that any site
they find listed on History Matters,
or any site that they can reach through a link from a site they
reached through History Matters
(and so on down the line), is valid and usable. Furthermore, History
Matters includes descriptions of what can be found at
the linked site. When high schoolers slow down enough to read carefully,
these can be a great resource.

My favorite example of a project from my classroom
that used History Matters as the enabler for effective Internet
use is a ninth grade United States history class, a class that insisted
on following its own interests wherever that led. We were discussing
Hamilton's plan to establish the credit of the United States
after the Revolutionary War. Students were genuinely puzzled about
how borrowing more–increasing the national debt–could
improve the nation's credit. When, eventually, I attempted
to bring the class back to our scheduled work, they wanted to know why we couldn't continue to learn about what interested them.
The eventual result was an open ended unit that depended in significant
ways on the students' interests to define our studies. We
decided to investigate the contributions to the nation of a variety
of "groups" that we identified as important to the "development"
of the United States, 1800-1860. These groups included inventors
and entrepreneurs; slaves in the South; immigrant laborers; women;
and political leaders. The class worked collaboratively. They began
by collecting information for oral presentations to each other.
That way everyone would learn what others had uncovered. This was
followed by a structured (and graded) debate on the question, "Who
Built America? 1800-1860." Finally, the class was divided into
work groups (see below) to create an interactive website that would
allow visitors to explore the historical questions that the class
had raised.

The kids needed accurate information even though
they were not entirely sure what they were looking for. In this
situation, History Matters
was especially helpful. It allowed them safely to surf the Internet,
roaming around in secondary and primary sources. They could locate
information, read it, put it into a growing context for their subject,
or abandon it and move on when they lost interest. For example,
in the project "Who Built America? 1800-1865," a student
began by investigating the role that slaves played in "building"
the American economy during the first half of the nineteenth century,
only to discover that what she was really researching was the role
of all those who contributed to economic development disproportionately
to what they received as compensation. Her topic expanded to include,
among others, the contributions of immigrant married women whose
work at home may have made possible the payment of subsistence wages
to male factory workers, thus allowing the accumulation of capital.
Without such a portal as History Matters,
I, as the teacher would have had to establish the basic questions
and provide a limited number of materials that, in my view, would
answer the questions posed. With the aid of History
Matters, it became possible for students in my ninth
grade class to follow their own leads wherever their research led
them–even before they were entirely sure what they were studying.
They developed questions based on their perusal of almost unlimited
information. These questions then oriented their continuing search
for more information. And their conclusions were validated by the
accurate historical information that they found on the Internet.

For the project "Who Built America? 1800-1865,"
the questions that the ninth grade students raised, developed and
responded to eventually were turned into a website. You can visit
the website at http://members.aol.com/nachamon.
It also can be accessed through our school's website, http://www.cesjds.org
(under "Student Projects"). The "rubrics" included
below–the criteria by which to judge–will help you understand
how the class was taught to do this activity. As many of you are
aware, in high schools rubrics are often used both as directions
for an activity and as a model of what the completed work should
look like when it meets the teacher's expectations. That way students "work to high expectations" rather than "working
to the test" (although the rubric also sets the criteria for
evaluation). For our ninth grade project, the class was divided
into three collaborative groups. The "Web Masters" held
primary responsibility for developing the website. The "Archivists"
principal assignment was to find appropriate primary sources. The
"Writers" needed to address the historically significant
issues and questions that the class's research had raised.

Rubrics for the Three Groups Working on the"Who
Built America?" Interactive Website

Web Masters:

An "A" site...

Will be free of all commercial advertising.

< Will be "user friendly" so that
users can easily make their way around the site; it will include
a site map and links to a search engine.

Will be interactive; that is, hyper-linked.

Will be well suited to the materials produced
by the rest of the 9H class for this project.

Archivists:

An "A" project...

Will include appropriate and historically
accurate primary sources and artifacts, arranged and presented
on the website so that they pose questions (or raise issues).

Will allow visitors to the website to use
the primary sources on the website to respond to the questions
or issues raised by the sources.

Will be diverse as to sub-topics within the
larger subject (Who Built America?).

Will be diverse as to type; for example, census
tables, pictures, diaries, newspaper accounts.

* Will have citations, as necessary, to any
materials that have been found in other locations and therefore
require citations.

Writers:

An "A" text...

Will address interesting and historically
significant issues and questions that you raise in the Web text
and then respond to in the Web text.

Will have all statements and conclusions supported by references to specific, accurate historical details.

Will have citations, as necessary, to any
materials that have been found in other locations and therefore
require citations.

< Will include at least some interactive elements;
for example, giving the reader choices about where to go next;
or, an interactive quiz as part of the text.

For All Groups:

Will work cooperatively with the other groups
in the class.

Arguing that a new technology can radically
change the way students learn is a mistake that has been made
often in the past. This time, however, with the Internet, I
believe that we have the possibility of something radically
different. And "http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu"
is one reason why genuinely new possibilities are becoming reality
in high school classrooms.